Yes!
Philip Hensher
In April, I published a novel, King of the Badgers, about a series of events in a small town in Devon called Hanmouth. It is, in a way, about private and public lives, and the surprising and sometimes deplorable events that happen between people when their front doors are closed. It got very enthusiastic reviews: the Sunday Times said it was ‘a really good old-fashioned novel: the sort of thing George Eliot might have written if she was interested in gay orgies and abducted chavs’.
Though it doesn’t make a point of obscenity, it does contain one scene in which a group of overweight gay men meet, as they regularly do, to have sex with each other. The scene has a pivotal function in the book, and some characters have their minds changed by it; others have their moral principles laid bare by it; for others, it has a terrible consequence.
Sometimes, in the past, I have omitted a pivotal scene, to let the reader reconstruct a catastrophe from its consequences. I know that technique often irritates readers. This time I thought I would actually say what happened.
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, some months later, read my novel, and in The Spectator Diary quoted one of the orgy scene’s frankest sentences. He asked, rhetorically, whether a novelist who describes a gay sexual encounter in specific terms risks reawakening homophobic prejudice in his readers. If an innocent homosexual is beaten to death in Trafalgar Square this weekend, I suppose that Sir Peregrine thinks that I bear some responsibility for that, by alerting readers to what some gay men might do, consensually and in private. But should one, as a novelist, tailor one’s invention to the requirements of people who obviously find gay people disgusting and repulsive on every level? Would any depiction of gay characters satisfy such a reader?
It’s important to distinguish between what people can and should do in real life, and what may be described in a novel. All sorts of behaviour generally considered a not very good idea in real life may perfectly well be described specifically in a novel — embezzlement, murder, sex with strangers.
As a novelist, one strives continuously against the vague and unobserved, and towards the specific. One tries to evoke the world through detail, as well as through implication of the specific: both are important tools of the novelist’s trade. In the past, sexual behaviour was described by novelists through implication and metaphor. When Frank Churchill hands Emma a pencil that has no lead in it, we know that his marriage to Jane Fairfax will not be satisfying. The long-echoing Roman corridors of Dorothea and Casaubon’s honeymoon say a good deal about the events in the bedroom.
The question is one of decorum. Jane Austen’s sense of intimacy and decorum is so fine that she never allows a heroine to accept a proposal of marriage other than in indirect speech. My novel, too, I believe, is strongly about decorum. It does follow a group of adult men into the orgy room. On the other hand, when a man who has kidnapped a child for sexual purposes enters the story, I would not let the novel follow him down into the cellar. Those events are reported using a disgusting euphemism of the character’s own. That was a very specific moral decision.
Nowadays, a writer may without fear of prosecution say what actually did happen between a Dorothea and a Casaubon. A good novelist will always try to bring specificity to every other part of human behaviour — how a character talks, eats a pizza, grooms himself, walks, dresses, even smells. He now has the freedom to describe him in the bedroom, or in this case, being buggered on a dining-room table. A bad writer will write unevocatively, banally about all these things, bringing his observations from a bank of stock gestures. If a good one does not choose to pass over these subjects altogether, he will write about them with freshness and observation. My personal rules in writing about this subject were two. I would not be euphemistic to spare a reader; and I would not idealise. There is far too much idealising writing about sex, and hardly any accurate observation.
A writer does not control how a reader will respond to his scenes of sex or, really, any other scene. The reader may, I suppose, be sexually stimulated by them even if (as in my case) there was no such intention; he may, just as unpredictably, be actively disgusted. My hope was that this scene would startle, exhilarate, and then make a reader laugh as two participants have a very confused conversation about Madonna. What I do think is that a reaction of primal disgust to something like this, and seeking to legislate on the basis of individual disgust, is not compatible with the novelist’s and reader’s motto of humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Peregrine Worsthorne
Contemporary gay novelists like Philip Hensher — one of the best — who quite brazenly portray the promiscuous and squalid side of homosexuality are taking a great risk. For underneath our surface of tolerance still lies, I believe, a deep-seated aversion to those practices which has been present in England since time began. The chronicles record Anselm rebuking the first king of England for that crime, and although kings and aristocrats usually got away with ostracism and exile, the lower classes all too often were pilloried or hanged.
Of course in the years since the Wolfenden report the situation has changed out of all recognition, with tolerance appearing to have given way even — heaven forbid — to approval, but anyone who has had occasion to watch the faces in a Soho pub when, late in the evening, a gay young couple starts kissing or fondling each other, can hardly fail to notice how quickly that veneer of tolerance dissolves. The disgust on the faces of the straight customers is frightening to see and one is left with the clear impression that were it not for the rigorous restraints of today’s politically correct culture — imposed from above — that provocatively imprudent gay couple would have been thrown out onto the street. If gay kissing and fondling arouses such disgust, it is not difficult to imagine the level of outrage in the hearts of those who live near Clapham Common, where nightly the gay provocations are far more offensive.
It is the raw physical sex thing that does it. No straights in their right mind object to same-sex passionate friendships, so long as the physical side is kept private. The Victorians were adept at that. Tennyson’s most intensely emotional poem is about his love for another man. The saintly John Henry Newman adored Hurrell Froude and was himself adored by Ambrose St John. But it was a highly personal romantic love; very much ‘a dressed up’ love. Oscar Wilde would never have got into trouble if he had limited his homosexual life to fellow aesthetes, instead of being tempted to go in for the rough trade. In my youth at school and university (Socrates and Alcibiades) and in the army I too had passionate friendships with other men. We wrote letters and poems to each other, kissed and embraced to the point of orgasm — at Stowe notoriously on a sofa with George Melly — and all went swimmingly until one day in Holland in the war a fellow officer, who tragically went on to have his balls shot off, on a camp bed broke the romantic rule by trying to put his flagstaff-size penis up my bum.
It was a painful shock which ended my homosexual adventures, since in those punitive years homosexuality for many owed more to the attractions of a glamorous secret cult — easy to abandon — than to a lifelong sexual orientation. Morality for me also played a part. For although a Catholic can just about talk himself into believing in the divine origins of physical love, the idea that God could smile on buggery or sodomy was and is quite out of the question.
So Philip Hensher is wrong to put me in the camp that ‘finds gay people disgusting and repulsive on every level’ (my italics). No, only at one level do I find it necessary to call a halt. And that is when the unacceptably squalid side of homosexuality – a side which even a modern bishop could not be expected to bless — seems to be getting dangerously out of control, and this is exactly the part Mr Hensher has seen fit to make public. For according to his account there are ostensibly respectable gay couples across the land who, when bored with shagging each other use the internet to organise literally no-holes-barred orgies between strangers where the anatomical contortions are such as to make mere buggery and sodomy seem like good clean fun. Truly, if a straight novelist were to have written this account, he would have been accused of homophobia — of whipping up a violently anti-gay backlash — but now it seems that one of the best gay novelists is so confident of gay invulnerability that he is prepared to take the risk.
Mindful of that pub glare for even a homosexual kiss, I think, and even in a nasty mood hope, that he will prove to have been too cocksure for comfort. Perhaps a better hope might be for a new outbreak of austere puritan homosexuality — once quite popular on the Continent — which aimed not so much at encouraging the ugly lusts of men as at saving men from the voluptuous wiles of women — thereby saving both sexes from today’s sad free-fall from decency, modesty and grace.